


always quick but never fleeting

by 28ghosts



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: M/M, pre-canon and post-canon, vaguely everyone lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-22
Updated: 2018-02-22
Packaged: 2019-03-22 11:33:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13763247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/28ghosts/pseuds/28ghosts
Summary: Baze still guards his temper, but not in the same way. Now he guards it like he once did seedlings in the temple greenhouse. He keeps it safe. He makes sure nothing harms it. He nurtures it; it nurtures him. But what he’s feeling in New Cimmeria isn’t anger. It’s terror.Terror has to be controlled same as anger. Baze drinks slowly and listens. He could ask questions, but he doesn’t trust his voice. He finishes his firewater. He pulls out his datapad and shuffles some credits around the half-dozen illegal shell accounts he holds.Four hours later, he is on a freighter bound for Jedha.





	always quick but never fleeting

I.  
Baze is on New Cimmeria when he hears. It has been three years since he left Jedha. He is in a dim spaceport cantina that serves only watered-down drink but which also promises no trouble, which is enough for Baze. There’s four or five droids that serve as bouncers, blasters set to stun drawn at all times. The bartender pours him an Ipellrilla firewater and says, “It’s been months since we had a fight here. Used to have this Terran pair of bouncers, turned out they were blackmailin’ smugglers under my own nose.” The bartender is Zabrakian. He winks at Baze. “I’m sure you’re alright, but I’m never hirin’ a Terran bouncer again. Droids don’t pull that kriff.”

Baze nods and grunts.

The bartender sidles down pay attention to the pair of pilots who’ve wandered in after Baze, and Baze hears one of them say, “Did you hear about Jedha?”

II.  
When Baze first came to the temple, he was twelve years old and tall as half the Guardians, wider in the shoulders than any of them. He didn’t like hand-to-hand combat, even though that’s what the Guardians wanted him to train in. He liked learning to read. He liked prayers. He liked being gentle. It was something he’d never been allowed to be before, not by his parents, not by the harshness of living on Jedha. 

A group of older Initiates liked to follow him around, trying to rile him up. “Baze the Bantha, just as docile and twice as dumb.” Baze ignored them.

It wasn’t that Baze didn’t have a temper. It was that Baze _did_ , and so he guarded his anger more preciously than he guarded anything else. He meditated for hours on his temper. He knew what the first flicker of irritation felt like in his body. He knew the best ways to calm himself.

The first time he couldn’t let anger die out while inside the temple, it was because a younger boy named Chirrut wouldn’t stop trying to jump on his back. The second time was because he caught the same Initiates who tormented him cornering Chirrut in a hallway and asking if he was so skinny because his parents never fed him because his parents hated him as much as everyone else at the temple did.

“I had that covered, you know,” Chirrut told him after Baze had knocked two of them into a wall and sent the other three scurrying.

“I don’t care,” Baze had growled.

And Chirrut had tilted his head, studying Baze’s expression like it was one of the riddles the Masters gave them to meditate on. Then he said, “Race you to the gardens?”

Chirrut had always been faster than Baze.

III.  
“What could anyone want on Jedha?” the bartender asks. “That’s just a rock where people go to pray.”

“Look,” one of the other pilots sitting at the bar drawls, “if the Empire could eradicate all street preachers, I’d enlist today.”

Baze still guards his temper, but not in the same way. Now he guards it like he once did seedlings in the temple greenhouse. He keeps it safe. He makes sure nothing harms it. He nurtures it; it nurtures him. But what he’s feeling in New Cimmeria isn’t anger. It’s terror.

Terror has to be controlled same as anger. Baze drinks slowly and listens. He could ask questions, but he doesn’t trust his voice. He finishes his firewater. He pulls out his datapad and shuffles some credits around the half-dozen illegal shell accounts he holds.

Four hours later, he is on a freighter bound for Jedha.

IV.  
The fever swept through Jedha the year Baze turned 16. He was one of the first to get sick and spent days alone in quarantine, chanting his way through the sweats. They hadn’t known then, how bad it would get -- none of them had. The head Guardians brought him bitter teas that didn’t help. On the second day, there were four others brought into quarantine; on the third day, twelve; on the fourth day, they gave up on isolating the sick. Baze recovered quickly. He escaped the seizures and the fainting spells. Chirrut didn’t.

“Since you were sick but you recovered,” Guardian Tillo told him on the fifth day, “we believe you immune.” Tillo didn't have to ask. Baze interrupted in offering to tend to the sick, to the dying.

Baze got good at making poultices, at shoving medicine down children’s throats. He slept by Chirrut’s bedside, waiting for him to wake, holding his hands and praying every morning for hours. NiJedha came to a standstill. Like everyone was hiding from a storm, keeping their heads down, focusing on surviving. On surviving and on burning the bodies of their dead. It was hard to bury bodies on Jedha. The Guardians left their dead in the catacombs, but other Jedhans burned theirs, and NiJedha was thick with smoke for weeks.

Chirrut woke, eventually. Baze took a vow of asceticism. He’d intended to take a vow of silence for a year, but that was before his best friend woke up from his fever blinded.

Chirrut mocked him for eating nothing but gruel and swearing off alcohol and sex. “Who’s lining up to sleep with you, anyways?” he said from his bed. He’d lost weight while he was sick but resisted Baze’s attempts to get him to eat more.

It was a year before he admitted to himself that there were easier ways to come to terms with being in love with Chirrut than taking vows that included chastity.

V.  
Chirrut is waiting for him in the spaceport. Of course he is.

“Before you ask, no, the Force did not send me,” Chirrut says with his wide, deferential smile aimed at Baze’s face. He’s braced against the wall, staff planted between his feet. “It was Guardian Iha, who says you sent them a holo.”

“Chirrut,” Baze says, relief coursing through him as sudden and unstoppable as a flash flood.

Chirrut grins and turns, and the battered edges of his robes still catch the light just like they used to. And Baze follows him into occupied Jedha, and Chirrut forgives Baze; of course he does. Baze knows he’s been a fool. Chirrut grins and says it’s easier to live as the fool. Oh, if only he’d taught Baze that sooner, he says, as they weave through alleys, dodging patrols. It’s the only way to survive.

VI.  
The rains on Jedha were so quick and brutal as to make tourists assume them to be fleeting. But when it rained on Jedha, it rained for days. The water sluicing through the gutters would run slowly clearer as it swept away the sand and grime that lined Jedha’s streets, and it would sweep away more precious things, too, if you weren’t careful.

All of that is gone now.

When it rains on Endor, it rains gently. There is nothing of Jedha in it. All that has been swept away, as Baze and Chirrut will be swept away one day, seized and drowned and welcomed in death by the swirls and eddies of the Living Force. For now, though, Baze watches Chirrut leading Rebel children through the motions the Guardians once studied in search of their first duan. It rains gently, and Chirrut does not notice it. Endor is so green.


End file.
